But this was a thought both maudlin and dangerous, and Matt suppressed it and focused his eyes willfully on the varnished tabletop.
Rachel joined him at the table; Annie did not. He said, “You’re not eating?”
“I ate. I have to dress. You two take your time.”
She left the room, but not before Matt noticed a glance that traveled between Annie and Rachel like a semaphore signal.
He looked at his watch and saw that the date crept ahead an extra day. How had that happened? In his dream he had seemed to sleep much too long—but that was only a dream. Focus, Matt thought. He suffered a momentary fear that the world might fade around him, the walls of reality shatter to reveal… a void.
“Want to hear the radio?” Rachel asked.
Christ, no, Matt thought. “No—please.” He was afraid, for reasons he could not admit, of what the radio might say. She recoiled a little. “Sorry, Daddy.”
“It’s all right.”
She picked at her eggs. The silence in the room was suddenly weighty, and Rachel’s smile had faded.
“Daddy,” she said, “I’m okay. Really.”
“Of course you are.”
“You’re worried about me. But I’m fine. I really am. Daddy?” She looked at him intently. “Daddy, did you dream last night?”
He would not endure the weight of the question. He fought a childish urge to close his eyes and cover his ears. He looked away from Rachel and said, through a wave of shame that seemed to thicken his tongue, “No, honey, I didn’t. I didn’t dream at all.”
He drove Annie home along the bay shore.
Buchanan was quiet again today, but it was a normal Saturday quiet, not yesterday’s odd and uneasy tranquility Folks were out in the morning cool, mowing lawns, weeding, making grocery runs. Matt allowed himself a moment’s appreciation of all this suburban peace.
A blue haze rode up the slope of the mountain. The air through the wing window carried a rich bouquet of pine resin and sun-warmed asphalt. Matt followed the lazy curve of the road past the commercial dock, where a trawler stood in rust-colored repose, through the business district and beyond a high bluff of land to the apartment complex where Annie lived.
He had never understood why she chose to live in this down-at-the-heels corner of town, in an old walk-up building with pasteboard walls. She had never explained. There were a lot of things Annie had never explained. Where she disappeared to the second Saturday of every month, for instance; or why she had never replaced her genteel but ancient furniture.
But she invited him up, and he accepted the invitation. For all its apparent poverty, this was still very much an Annie kind of place: a bedroom and a big living room overlooking the bay, sparsely furnished, clean wooden floors, the elderly tabby-cat Beulah snoozing in a patch of sunlight. The apartment was as economical as a haiku: Every detail mattered.
Annie spooned out coffee into the basket of her coffee maker. Beulah had been fed by a neighbor; she paid no attention to the kitchen noises. The machine began to burble. Annie said, “We have to talk, Matt.”
He knew that “we have to talk” was polite code for an impending emotional meltdown, and he didn’t like it. He stood at the window and watched the ocean roll out blue and calm to the horizon. Did they have to talk? Was silence such a bad thing?
“Matt?” she said. “Did you dream last night?”
It was almost possible to hate her for the question.
He said, “Rachel asked me the same thing.”
“Oh? What did you tell her?”
“I told her no.”
“I don’t think she believed you.”
“She didn’t say.”
“J don’t believe you.”
He turned away with enormous reluctance from his view of the sunlit sea. “What’s this about, Annie?”
“I had a dream,” she said. “Rachel had a dream. I think every living human being on the surface of the Earth had that dream. Even you.”
He fought an urge to bolt for the door. He was sweating, he was tense, and he couldn’t resist his own diagnosis: Denial, announced the premed hotshot inside him. You’re denying what you don’t want to face.
He sat down at Annie’s lacquered pine dinner table and closed his eyes. Beulah bumped against his leg. He picked her up. Beulah began to purr.
“All right,” he said flatly. “Tell me what you dreamed.”
But it wasn’t a dream, Annie said, not really. It was a visitation, and the agency of that visitation had been the microorganisms—or machines—Jim Bix had warned him about.
(“No, Matt, don’t ask me how I know these things. I just do. Let me finish.”)
The microbes were neither organism nor mechanism, Annie said; they were an amalgam of both, or something beyond either. They were capable of reproduction and were even, in their own dim way, intelligent. They had been distributed into the atmosphere by the trillions upon trillions, had ridden the jet stream to the extremities of the Earth, and by the end of July they had colonized every human organism on the surface of the planet. Within the last week they had begun to reproduce; their growth and their activity was what had produced the alarming hematology results.
Their job was to function as the voice of the Artifact. That is, of the Travellers.
Annie called them “Travellers” because that was their name for themselves: It defined them. Like the microbes they created, they were not organic beings. Unlike their creations, they once had been. They had been both organic and planetbound: creatures like ambulatory sponges, building their cities in the methane-rich tidal sinks of an Earth-sized moon orbiting a Jovian planet of an unimaginably distant star.
They had outgrown their world. They had poisoned it with organic and machine wastes, a catastrophe averted only by their abandonment of both organism and mechanism. In the wake of that crisis they became Travellers: planetless, bodiless.
The Artifact was their world now. It was both a physical structure and a much larger virtual environment. They inhabited it, a greater number of souls than the Earth contained human beings, but only a few of them occupied physical bodies at any given time, and then only for the purpose of repairing and maintaining the Artifact itself.
They were, she told Matt, not a hive or a computer or any such easily imagined thing; they were separate creatures, individuals, unique—but capable of so much more, being immaterial; of complex joinings and indefinite sleeps, of enduring the long journeys between stars without boredom or decline, of learning without ending. Their lifespan was indefinite, unlimited. They had achieved a kind of immortality.
They had been Travellers, Annie said—-knowing some of these things only as she said them—since the Earth was a whirl of dust and the sun a hot new star, and they had forgotten nothing of what they had seen in those millennia. They were a vast library of inconceivably ancient wisdom, and they had arrived at the Earth at what they considered a critical and fortuitous moment, because, Annie said, we are what they had once been: intelligent, planetbound, and poisoning a world with our waste products.
It was obvious, she said, why they hadn’t communicated with governments or world leaders. They had a better means of communication, the cybernetic microbes, a kind of arm of themselves with which they could touch each human being individually. This more intimate contact was the only communication worthy of the word. The microbes, which might be called neocytes, interfaced with nervous tissue, touching but not changing it. At the brink of Contact they had soothed the frightened population of the Earth—sedated us, Annie said, yes, but only long enough and deeply enough to prevent panic. Then they had induced a kind of long, deep sleep, and in that sleep the Travellers had spoken. They had spoken to six billion human beings over the course of the next thirty hours, and what they spoke was not merely language but a complex of, for lack of a better word, understandings, deeper and more profound than language could ever be. And they had explained all this and more, much more than Annie could tell.